Following on my last submission in issue 128, here is another attempt to provide continuous music accompanied by graphic displays. As is often the case, I must acknowledge the great help provided by Alyce Watson and Stefan Pendle in producing this latest version of an automated Clipart viewer with optional music accompaniment. Much of the code for the viewer was extracted from IMAGE323.BAS from Alyce’s web site along with her IMAGE323.DLL, and the Music player adapted from a MP3 player in her e-book. There are numerous other players in her e-book you may wish to modify for you own version of this program.

It is one of my dreams that these one of these type of programs ( not necessarily mine ) will find its way into such as Hospital or Doctors waiting rooms, instead of us having to suffer the boring displays of such as who is on duty, and health warnings etc. You may notice I have preferred to adopt the simple practice of ensuring the picture fills the whole screen, irrespective of whether the width to height ratio of the image is correct.

You will see I have tested it as capable of handling only certain Image files, but it is possible it may cope with other formats though there is ample software available, capable to convert between different formats. On startup you are presented with a dialog window inviting you to select the type of clipart to be used or enter the word ALL to use all acceptable files in the Directory, as controlled by the FILTER$ in [pickpicts]. The sub [boxhold] prevents this window vanishing if you click elsewhere. If you fail to select a music file in [pickmusic], the program will display all the image files, without accompaniment; otherwise it will also play all the music files as well. Readers may have previously noticed my way of storing files in [create] based on DIR.BAS provide with LB.

Once an image file has been displayed in the [start] section the program diverts to the [loop]. An artificial harmless Ctrl key press is periodically used here to prevent any screen saver obliterating the clipart. If music has been selected, a check is made to determine if the playing of the music file is finished; if so the program diverts to [music] to start a new file, and increments the tune for next time. The program then halts for the period set by SHOW from the opening window, then goes back to [start] for the next image file.

Comments always welcome in the Conforum